When troubles come

"When troubles come, they come not as single spies but in battalions." (Claudius, Hamlet Act IV, Scene V)

 I wonder if  one of the functions of the story of Job is to enable us to place our own battalions in perspective. I think few would have it as badly as Job did.

A friend remarked to me in respect of some of my recent battalions with words to the effect of 'we wonder what God is doing in all this'.

Oddly, that is not how I wonder.

I'm nothing like Job, but I am well schooled in the corruption and decay that we are part of in this fallen and marred creation, established for us to enjoy God within, but brought to its futility by Adam and all his offspring.

I made the mistake many decades ago of not being able to deal with egregious trials with similar perspective. That mistake did bring some benefits, but at the same time derailed my Christian work for some following decades. Some gain, but much loss.

Now, I don't think such thoughts. With self and family experiencing debilitating health events, all I can think is, life is like this; it can be worse, much worse; and it can be better. But our call is not to this world but is the upward call of God in Christ (Phil 3:14) as he works all things together (as participating agent, not puppet-master) for our (final) good. In this he draws us to himself as we look toward the world made new and un-alloyed fellowship with our Saviour world without end.

Humanity stinks

At the denouement of one of the most emotionally searing Foyle's War: "Bad Blood" an old friend (DCS David Fielding) remarks to Foyle, as they reflect on the outcome of an investigation that included a murder and death from Anthrax poisoning:

Look around you Christopher, there's so much evil, so much bad blood; humanity stinks...

He speaks to Christopher, 'Christ bearer', about that which Christ dealt with as he reflects on the horrors of chemical and germ warfare and its effects on his comrades in the Great War and on a few civilians in the story.

With this in mind, and recent events of my experience, I see so well how sin weighs down on us, both as man and as mankind: each of us and all of us .

Sin...often regarded as isolated, if frequent, actions that are 'a sin', that 'break God's law'. If only we knew: Isaiah 64:6 tells the full story!

Sin is hamartia, 'missing the mark'.

We've all missed the mark. Not in individual acts, but in our un-God-like-ness. The sin that crushes us; squeezes out of us our intended humanity, scars us with the frustration of destruction and decay, our communion with our maker stifled as we reap its wages.

Christ took our sin, swallowed its crushing power over us on the cross; then showed in his resurrection that he has freed us from that power, he has crushed it, restoring us to the glorious state of eternal communion with God our Father.

As I was thinking this, Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem: God's Grandeur, came to mind:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

 [words from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur]

 

Christ our Lord is risen

We are here to celebrate the greatest day in history from the moment God created heaven and earth until Christ returns. And that's a mighty big statement, isn't it?

 

How do I have the audacity to claim that? Because on the day of Jesus' resurrection he proved salvation was possible and so everything changes for everyone who has ever and will ever live.

 

It changed my life and it changed your life; and if you doubt that claim finding, it so hard to comprehend in this secular earthly existence I beg of you not just to walk the walk but to dig deep.

 

Even if you simply wish to reaffirm your belief today, after you've eaten your roast lamb, find a Bible and read 1 Corinthians 15. It contains Paul's logical succinct argument for belief in the resurrection backed up by eye witness accounts. The resurrection was not just a mythical event to them but a factual historical miracle.

 

Or if you relate to a more visual experience watch a fabulous  movie: The case for Christ, a true story about an investigative journalist who was an avid atheist. He embarked on a research campaign to disprove Jesus' resurrection, but at the end he falls to his knees in astonishment and complete acceptance that Jesus, fully God and fully man, walked with us on this earth, died by crucifixion and rose again in glory.

 

And if your heart is touched and changed then please work through how to respond to that new found truth.

 

Call to prayer at our Easter Morning Sung Holy Communion 9 April 2023

Is God fair?

 I came across a video on this point, dealing with a claim that 'God is unfair'. The answer was couched in purely judicial terms, reducing God's love and our faith in gratitude to mere forensic transactions.

Most comments saw the hollowness of the response.

This comment more so:

This type of crass moralism is not Christianity.

The problem we have is that we (everyone) are spiritually the walking dead. We have elevated ourselves to 'god' in our own (delusional) eyes and so refuse to turn to the living and speaking creator God, Yahweh, for life.

The point of Christ's work is to open up the way for re-connection, and that is by re-birth, being 'born again' spiritually. This is done by turning from our own futile and delusional god-ness and relying on Christ to give us new life. We cannot be in God's family/kingdom (as joint heirs with Christ) without new life; the living dead would be just dead in the kingdom of light. They would be aliens there, just as fish in fresh air.

In Christ, he being God, God's domain and our domain (the created cosmos) come together, and will be finally renewed. Where at last Rorty's hope for justice and beauty in a single vision would be realized, if only he could have grasped that (his essay Trotsky and the Wild Orchids).

It's not about 'crime and punishment' but about death and life. No matter how 'good' we think we are, we are 'dead in sin'. That is in 'being cut-off from God'. That needs to be repaired, and can only be done by Christ who defeated sin on the cross and proved it by his resurrection.

 

God is fair. The evidence is starkly before us all in Nagel's Edge (read his View from Nowhere), and he (our Father in heaven) gives us the free choice of rejecting death and receiving life...or not.

Source: Is God Fair?

The View from Nowhere

Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, wrote a book: The View from Nowhere, which included observations on death.

His defining observation was:

I am concerned with the adequate recognition of my eventual annihilation itself. There will be a last day, a last hour, a last minute of consciousness, and that will be it. Off the edge.

Page 225

Then I go to David Horowitz' book Radical Son. He writes of his thoughts of his parents: "...not even now that they had been returned to their primordial dust...It seemed to me a metaphor for life itself, which sets us free only to bring us relentlessly back to earth.

In his earlier years, Horowitz had been a major player in the 1960 USA student commitment to a communist revolution in the USA...on the basis of what he now terms a powerful "crypto-religion" that transformed into "..cultural Marxism, which denied the very idea of the individual and revived Marx's class as a war against racial and gender oppression."

This sought (seeks) to obliterate the individual, the only locus of suffering and the only source of personhood and its values.

Yet, if one considers that we are but dust and will return to dust, nothing about the individual as having inherent value remains.

It only exists, because we are made like God, and by God: Genesis 2:7.

Only two religions

 There are but two religions: worship of the creation, and worship of the creator.

The first step is to figure out what you are worshipping. Then establish the grounds for worship of the creator instead of the creation or creature.

And worship? Simply turning to the one worshiped as the orienting ground of your life and thought. The choice in simple terms: dust (the creation) or mind (the living creator).

 But here's the issue with worship of the creature/creation: it is seeking a resolution of the dilemma of the human condition from within the domain that hosts that condition. Like trying to lift yourself by your boot straps. No. The resolution has to come from outside the grand system of corruption that we are in: thus the Creator enters the creation, taking on human nature to overcome the corruption, demonstrated in the resurrection. And as tangible as our life and the creation itself: within the stream of history that we are also in.

Rescue comes really, and only from outside the sinking ship; not by moving its deck-chairs.

The church to join?

 How do you find a church to join?

Here's a tip: look for one like the one in this letter from a minister to his church as it looks to the year ahead.

This is a small country church in a large enough town.

The congregational committee started to meet for this year.  The committee members are A, B, C, D and F (names obscured, of course), and they will look after rosters, music and training readers.

We have four adult Bible classes for first half-year:

The Rector                   Practical Discipleship

Rector's warden           Genesis

Bishop Jones (ret'd)    The Psalms of Messiah

Deaconess Smith        Minor Prophets

There are five home groups this year. Joe Flynn will be the secretary to organize them with the groups being hosted by: Ernest Borgnine, Tim Conway, Yoshio Yoda, Jane Dulo and Lisa Seagram.

Our year started with a thanksgiving prayer meeting in which 20 participated.

Following on from this in February we held our Home Group Launch to which 78 people come (pot-luck lunch and very enjoyable).

Men's Mountain is back after a successful year last year. This year we have some great dinners lined up with speakers from far and near, including Bishop Jones talking about his adventures in the bush with Leon Morris all those years ago.

The Men's Mountain project this year is to help St Eric's at Junee with their first steps towards prison ministry. We'll be staying on a wheat farm! St Eric, as you man know, is the patron saint of Law.

The first of our community seminars was for our older folk, or those with older parents and dealt with aged care options and legal concerns.Brad and Janet organized it.

Our next community seminar will be on managing the work-life-kids-rest-hobbies balance. It will be in May, details to come later.

This year our sermon pattern will be each month:

1st Sunday: OT

2nd Sunday: NT

3rd Sunday: Theology

4th Sunday: Society, that is apologetic and social issues with a biblical critique.

The 5th Sunday,  when it occurs will be on an aspect of church history.

Of course the names have been obscured (with the cast of McHale's Navy), but you get the drift. It's  a little church that you've got to love!